How to Get Entrepreneurial Ideas out of Your Head and Into Reality

If you’re a blogger or online entrepreneur, there’s no doubt you’ve heard of Pat Flynn.

Pat is a writer, blogger, and podcaster, and helps readers all across the internet create smart passive income from their blogs. He went from being laid off in 2008 to creating a website to help people pass an architectural exam – earning $7000 in his first month. I love how although he teaches about passive income, he is anything but! Pat has evolved his approach over the years, constantly experimenting with new mediums, fresh ideas, and shipping numerous projects and products. He spends considerable time creating and initiating, and I really wanted to chat with him on the ProBlogger podcast about the challenge of creating products around a blog.

In episode 67, I talked about why creating your own product to sell on your blog can be a powerful thing – I even outlined 9 ways you’re losing opportunities if you don’t have one. I ask Pat what he thinks is stopping bloggers from taking that step, if he thinks every blogger should do it (or if it only works for certain niches), how he decides what to create, and where to start.

One of the topics we dive into is fear. Fear is one of those things that hold back a lot of bloggers – including Pat, at times. I ask him how he moves forward despite the fear, and how he deals with those feelings when they arise.

We also discuss some listener questions and talk about how to choose a product to create, what kind of research you should do, the tools for creation, and marketing and pricing. Pat tells me about his new book Will it Fly?and the road that led to its creation.

You can find today’s show notes at ProBlogger.com, and you can leave feedback on Twitter (Pat is at @patflynn).

How many times have you been in a meeting and someone says to you, “That’s a great idea, you should take the initiative and make it a reality.” What typically happens? Most of the time – nothing. Most great ideas remain dormant because people don’t have the courage, resources, time and/or money to take action. And for those who take action, most are unprepared and thus find themselves spending their valuable time and money on a dream that simply goes astray.

Converting an idea into a reality (regardless of the required investment of time and money) is never an easy task. In fact, it is extremely difficult. Whether you are an entrepreneur or corporate executive, “giving ideas life” is much like giving birth to a child. You must own the responsibility regardless of the circumstances. No one will ever understand your idea or the dynamics associated with it like you do. In this regard, you are on your own and the journey will require you to learn about yourself – more than anything else will in your career.

One idea I’m going to begin exploring in my blog is the “entrepreneurial mindset.” If I had to sum it up in one word, that word would be “proactive.” Among other things, it means being ‘enterprising’, ‘a take charge person’, ‘energetic’, ‘driven’, ‘bold’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘motivated’. Fear, on the other hand, invariably leads to hesitation, indecision, pessimism, and inaction. As Napoleon Hill stated in ‘Think and Grow Rich’, the fear of poverty “paralyzes the faculty of reason, destroys the faculty of imagination, kills off self reliance, undermines enthusiasm, discourages initiative” and, in general, wreaks havoc on one’s ability to realize their potential and make things happen. Then, of course, there’s fear of criticism to overcome, which can be equally or even more debilitating. So, yeah, fear can be our biggest enemy, when it comes to being a successful online entrepreneur.